With the new year comes reflection, and how better to reflect than with an endless sea of top-10/20/50/83494 lists? I don’t remember ever disagreeing with a batch of best-records-of-the-year lists as much as I have this year – I don’t know what it is, but I just thought a lot of the stuff that everyone seemed to love was pretty blah. Vampire Weekend? Overrated. Fleet Foxes? Boring. She and Him? Eh. Nick Cave? Go away.

There were an awful lot of people who seemed to make the list just because they managed to release an album between January 1 and December 31, regardless of quality, like Beck, R.E.M., and Cat Power. There’s a lot of decent stuff, but not great. Then again, a lot of what I thought was really good was probably just decent at best to others. Ah well.